The Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University organizes for the second year in a row the interdisciplinary conference "Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science", including theoretical and artwork presentations. In 26-28 May 2017 the conference will take place once more in the island of Corfu.

The conference continues to focus: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality - as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. Art’s playfully transgressive nature offers creative bypasses to the grammar of science and expands the dialogue with its openness to a multiplicity towards the new. Nevertheless, art – albeit its originary affinity with the taboo – is never completely liberated from moral considerations. Deeply involved into this lively discourse on the nature of the taboo, art becomes the very domain of contemporary experimentation with transgression, in order to provoke and sparkle discourse, catalyzing possible forms of transcendence.

This year's conference is inspired by the work of the pioneers who challenged the linear thinking towards spatial arts and time-based media and the ones who were able to transcend the illusion of reality and the confines of technology. Those who first took humankind into space, the ones who have described time traveling, the ones who saw beyond the restrictions of senses, the fearless who were innocent enough to show the potential in the human species and sufficiently cynical to describe the fragility of any civilization: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, Isaac Asimov, George Pal, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick and so many other visionaries. This year's conference is dedicated to all those who keep pushing the limits further than the next gadget and understand the essential role of fantasy when synchronized with reality. One step further, one more time, knowing that the truly opening dimension might be towards the voyaging of consciousness.